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The number of Canadians pursuing useless post-secondary degrees, often on borrowed money, has apparently gotten under the Prime Minister’s skin. Mr. Harper, it is reported, is growing increasingly frustrated that there are hundreds of thousands of job vacancies that Canadian employers need filled, but remain open because Canadians lack the skills or training.

This results in Canada needing hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers while youth unemployment languishes at double the national rate. This is putting a real damper on our economic productivity at a time when governments at every level are desperate to boost growth.

It is indeed a problem, and one that the Harper government has been trying to wrap its mind around for years. With only limited success — the CBC’s Greg Weston reports that a variety of plans have been proposed and rejected. Hence Mr. Harper’s growing frustration.

The problem seems simple in the abstract: There are young Canadians who need to get an education and then a job after that, and there are Canadian companies that are desperately eager to hire these people. But there’s a missed connection here: The educational choices of these young Canadians are steering them into fields that are either dead ends, low-paying or hopelessly glutted with applicants. If they’d all just take up welding or natural resources extraction, with a minor in information technology, all our problems would be solved.

But that’s the trouble with human beings: Sometimes they insist on doing what they want to do, rather than what would be optimal for the national economy.

And there are undeniably cultural factors at play. Our society does not place much social value on being a pipe fitter or an electrician. It does place economic value on those jobs, and others like it. Put simply, they pay well. But to the (limited) extent that high school students think about their long-term professional careers at all, they’re like to value something with a little more flash and style, even if it doesn’t pay as well (which the students probably don’t realize is the case, anyway). You don’t get a date to the prom talking about your future as a skilled construction worker.

There is a further irony at work here. Not only are too many young Canadians prioritizing degrees that will lead to little or no professional opportunities, they’re borrowing huge wads of cash to do it. The cost of post-secondary education has boomed in recent years, going up 200% in some provinces. Yet enrollment also keeps going up: Canada is among the better educated countries in the world, by percentage of population with post-secondary degrees. Students are just borrowing to make up the difference. The average debt-load for a student graduating with a post-secondary degree sits somewhere in the range of $25,000-$30,000.

There’s a tendency among older Canadians to dismiss the struggles of the younger generation. “We struggled, they’ll do fine in the end” or “Serves ‘em right, they’re entitled whiners” seem to be popular sentiments. This is short-sighted in the extreme. Baby Boomers haven’t saved nearly enough for their retirement. Most of them are counting on the value of their home to sustain their final decades. Newsflash, folks: If the kids can’t get jobs that pay a living wage, they can’t buy your house. At least not for what you’re expecting to get for it.

For all the reasons above, the problems are real. And, as the Prime Minister has reportedly discovered, dealing with it is difficult. There’s not much the government can do, or should be asked to do, about the culture that values dead-end degrees over training in a booming industry. Education at the high school level would help with that: Students should be given an intense course in the basics of post-secondary education — what it costs, how student loans work, what the job market is asking for, and average wages for the options. That alone might serve as a shakeup.

But if governments, federal or provincial, really want to tackle this problem, it will require some very tough love indeed. Governments provide huge money to students, whether through grants, scholarships or loans. It’s time to only direct that support toward university or college programs that will meet the needs of the economy. Everyone would retain the right to go into Women’s Studies or, as I did, military history, but on your own dime. If you want the government’s help getting educated, you have to do something the national economy needs.

Such a plan would be unpopular, since equal access to post-secondary education is seen by many as a basic right. And it wouldn’t be easily implemented, or foolproof once in place: There would always be the very real danger of the government’s assessment of what skills were in demand lagging well behind the real-life economy.

But it would still be a big step in the right direction. If the state is forking over the cash to get you educated, there’s nothing wrong with it taking an active interest in what it is you’re studying.